Billy Corben

Corben's career got off the ground in the early 2000s, when he and Alfred Spellman established Rakontur, a Miami-based production studio that would go on to define a particular kind of documentary filmmaking — regional, reported, and unapologetically entertaining. Not prestige-documentary-circuit stuff. Something rawer. The film that changed everything was *Cocaine Cowboys* — a sprawling, propulsive account of how Miami became the cocaine capital of the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, told largely through interviews with smugglers, hitmen, and law enforcement figures who lived through it. The film built a devoted following and showed that Corben had a genuine gift for making nonfiction feel cinematic without losing the journalistic substance underneath. It's the kind of documentary where you keep reminding yourself that the people on screen are real, because the stories they're telling sound like they were written for the movies. From that foundation, Corben expanded into sports with *The U* and *The U Part 2*, his contributions to ESPN's acclaimed 30 for 30 documentary series, which traced the rise and controversies of the University of Miami Hurricanes football program — a story that's really about money, ambition, and the way a college sports team can become a mirror for everything going on in a city at a given moment. *Dawg Fight* followed, turning its lens on South Florida's underground bare-knuckle fighting scene. And then came *537 Votes* in 2020, which examined the chaotic, consequential recount period following the U.S. presidential election in Florida — a film that felt both like history and like something that hadn't finished happening yet. Across all of it, the Rakontur approach stays consistent: find the Florida story nobody's told properly, then tell it like your life depends on it (Wikipedia, TMDB).